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So, Solaris comes with lots of nice tools for querying our SAN HBAs, but the ones we’ve looked at so far are only of any real use when the HBA has a live connection to it.

What about when we want to find the WWN to setup our SAN, before we’ve plugged any fibre in?

picl is a hardware monitoring daemon in Solaris. I first started playing with it on mid-frame and high-end machines (SF6500s and F15ks) where the system controller (SC) talked to picl to do hardware monitoring of a Solaris domain.

We can talk to picl ourselves with prtpicl. We need the verbose option to get something useful, but be warned – this will dump out pages and pages of stuff – so we need to filter it a bit with grep.

These are the node WWNs that we’re after, with the first one being c2, the second c3, and so on. The internal controller is last, and we can see the WWNs of the two FC disks that are hanging off it. (Remember, on a V490 we have internal FC-AL disks, not SCSI).

Finally, for our last trick, if we have Solaris 10 01/06 or later, we can use the awesome fcinfo command, which makes all of this very, very easy indeed.

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In the previous post I listed the ‘long way round’ to find out the WWN from active HBA links in Solaris. The commands I listed before will work on all recent releases of Solaris. If you’re able to migrate to Solaris 10, you can make things easier for yourself.

cfgadm will take a verbose flag, which will print out a listing that includes the full device path. This will definitely work on Solaris 9 and 10 – I’m afraid I don’t have an 8 box to test though.

Again, this all works only if the HBA has a live link – it needs some cable plugged in, and you need to have something listening at the other end. I’ll be exploring how to find the WWN of your HBAs – even if they’re not plugged in – soon, using some other features of Solaris.

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When connecting a Solaris machine to a SAN, you’ll usually need to know the WWN of the host bus adapter (HBA). WWNs are a bit like MAC addresses for ethernet cards – they are unique, and they’re used to manage who is connected to what, and what they can see.

The quickest and easiest way to check the WWN is when we have an active HBA. We can use the cfgadm command under Solaris to check our adapter states:

This particular machine I’m playing on is a Sun v490, which uses internal FC-AL disks – so the sixth controller port we can see (the ISP2200) is the internal controller for the internal root disks. Why the sixth? Due to the way the V490 initialises itself, the internal controller is tested and configured after all the PCI slots.

And there is our listing of WWNs. The 50060e8014118920 WWN belongs to our SAN device at the other end (note the type of ‘0x0 Disk device’), and the first WWN of 210000e08b1ea9ef is for our HBA.

Note that this just works for cards which have an active connection to a SAN fabric. If we haven’t plugged them in yet, we need to use some lower level Solaris tools, which I’ll be covering in another post.